What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate. Joanna Blythman
herbs state their country of origin on the label, but even this can be less than straightforward. Herbs grown on Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied Left Bank, or Palestine, are sometimes labelled as coming from the West Bank rather than Israel. West Bank herbs should not be considered as Palestinian or as an alternative source for people who prefer not to buy Israeli produce as a protest against Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
FOOD AS MEDICINE?
Although herbs have always featured among the culinary plants grown in Britain and Ireland, they were more commonly grown for medicinal purposes, everywhere from abbey cloisters to physic gardens. Other than parsley, fresh herbs rarely featured in any abundance in our cooking until the 1980s. Once seen as rarefied or specialist ingredients generally imported from sunnier climes, they now seem like a kitchen essential. This has opened up the market for herb growers in the UK and they are helping us to appreciate the range and diversity of herbs that can be grown here.
Are herbs a green choice?
Flying herbs thousands of miles just so we can make fresh pesto in December, or decorate dishes with chervil and mint in February, is environmental lunacy and contributes to unnecessary, avoidable carbon emissions. It is better to let your cooking be informed by the seasons. Hardier herbs like thyme and rosemary go well with heartier autumn and winter food and feel right for that time of year, while the fleshier, tender green herbs like dill, chives and chervil work best with lighter spring and summer ingredients.
Where and when should I buy herbs?
Tougher, hardier herbs like rosemary, thyme and bay can be grown outdoors in the UK year round so they can be considered as kitchen staples that are always at your disposal. British-grown tender green herbs like basil or chervil are available from June until September. The more prolific, vigorous home-grown green herbs like mint and chives have a slightly longer growing season from April through to October.
Will herbs break the bank?
Even though the pick-up price of fresh herbs may seem relatively small, herbs have some of the steepest mark-ups (several hundred per cent) of any food we buy. The retailer’s explanation for this is that they are highly perishable so wastage is high, but this is also true of salad leaves, which have much lower mark-ups. Another defence is that they are imported by air, which is expensive. However, as the price of herbs doesn’t vary much, if at all, throughout the year even when home-grown herbs are in prolific supply, this argument needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Whenever possible, buy herbs in Asian shops and supermarkets, from grocers specializing in Middle Eastern foods, or from farmers’ markets and farm shops. You will get a fistful of herbs for the cost of a few stems in the supermarket.
One way to get better value out of supermarket herb plants like basil and chives is to break each one up into much smaller clumps of roots and repot in new pots, giving them more space to grow. This will produce a more usable herb and more vigorous, healthy growth. Treated like this, a purchase of one herb plant can give you a summer’s worth of supply.
Despite their often high price, herbs can help you cook quite economically because they have the capacity to transform otherwise humdrum, cheap ingredients into something special. By using herbs to lend colour and flavour to your food, you can cut down on more expensive ingredients such as meat and cheese and make much more of vegetables, grains and pulses.
Lettuce and other salad leaves
The umbrella terms ‘lettuce’ and ‘salad leaves’ do not do justice to the exciting portfolio of salad greens that can be grown in the UK. British salad need never be boring at any time of the year.
There are six broad categories of salad leaf:
Dark green and peppery
Mustard cress
Watercress
Landcress
Rocket
Tatsoi
Mizuna
Mibuna
Nasturtium
Soft and sweet
Lamb’s lettuce/corn salad
Butterhead (curly)
Oak leaf
Lolla rossa (red)
Lolla bionda (green)
Salad bowl
Juicy and sweet
Pea shoots
Purslane
Juicy and sharp
Sorrel
Claytonia
Red chard
Spinach
Red orach
Bitter
Belgian chicory
Red (Treviso chicory)
Frisée endive
Radicchio
Dandelion
Escarole
Batavia
Crunchy
Cos/Romaine
Buttercrunch
Little Gem
Webb’s wonderful
Lakeland
To make a great ‘green’ salad, the art is to combine leaves with different colours, textures and flavours so that the salad is packed with interesting contrasts. For extra freshness, you can add any seasonal herbs that you have to hand.
While vegetables like carrots can be stored for months and still taste good, salad leaves need to be ultra-fresh to deliver on the taste front. Hearts of Little Gem lettuce, for example, may stay looking green in the fridge for a week or more but their fresh sweetness will give way to an unpleasant, flat bitterness.
Puffy ‘pillow’ packs of salad leaves are filled with ‘modified atmosphere’ (nitrogen and carbon dioxide gas) to prolong their life. They may look fine when you buy them, but often flop dramatically when exposed to air. This is because their life has been extended unnaturally and so they just don’t have the natural vitality, or the flavour, of freshly picked leaves. It makes more sense to buy fresh whole lettuces and leaves that have not been packed this way so you can more easily assess their freshness.
Modern supermarket distribution systems can mean that it takes several days for salads to reach our shelves. They must be ready picked by growers in anticipation of a supermarket order, sent to a factory for trimming, or full cleaning and bagging, then on to a distribution centre, which may not be close by, before being trucked from stores where they will be sold with a ‘best-before’ date a few days on. Traditional greengrocers, market stalls and box schemes cannot rely on refrigeration to store salads so when you buy salad leaves from these outlets, it is much more obvious whether they are really fresh or not.
Things to do with salad leaves
• Combining the more ordinary salad leaves with fresh herbs such as whole mint leaves, flat parsley, fronds of chervil, dill and oregano – including any that are flowering – will make the mix much more inspiring.
• Dress the more bitter leaves, such as radicchio and curly endive, with nut oils (walnut or hazelnut) and cider or sherry vinegar.
• Use whole, crunchy leaves (such as Little Gem or Cos) as a ‘plate’ for hot minced pork or duck that has been stir-fried, mixed with a little ground toasted rice, fresh coriander and mint leaves, then dressed with lime juice, palm sugar and fish sauce in the style of an Asian ‘larb’ (meat salad).
• Salad leaves become the basis for a meal if you put them together with crisp-fried bacon, soft-boiled egg and croutons of fried bread.
• For a fail-safe, classic vinaigrette, use three parts extra virgin